The Body Abject

Horror fiction, ghost stories, monster movies: they’ve always summed up my uncomfortable relationship with my body and my gender in ways that other genres don’t quite touch on. In horror bodies are shown as they can be: strange, often gross, malleable, fascinating, uncontrollable, constricted by the pressure of meeting arbitrary rules and standards where a misstep can seem, or can be, dangerous. Queer is coded as uncanny, seductive, violent. Under these circumstances a ghost disassociates; a monster lashes out; a person turns inwards or outwards but always away from themselves.